This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 am by Dawn and is filed under Industry talk, Instructional design for single source, On-demand learning, Reusability 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
We were recently able to talk with both Elliott Masie and Dr. Conrad Gottfredson about informal learning, multichannel publishing and performance support for the Xyleme podcast series.
Challenge and Need
Gottfredson said that it was the job of learning professionals to support learners throughout their journey, and has identified five key moments of need where they require support. He started by listing the two traditional points of need; when learning new information and when building on past learning. He then added three additional stages where learners often need on-demand information and assistance; applying and remembering what they’ve learned, troubleshooting and resolving problems, and when facing change.
Learning professionals can become so overwhelmed in their work that Gottfredson said they often wonder how they’ll have time to expand past the instructional design challenges of the first two settings and on to offering dynamic performance support. This is where multichannel publishing comes in, he said, aiding particularly in the difficult tasks of keeping information current and repurposing it across different groups in an organization.
When there can be a 60-75 percent overlap between the content among help desk support, technical publications and training groups, Gottfredson said that reusable learning objects can both accomodate different deliverables and support the deployment of up-to-date information.
Gottfredson said that because as much as three quarters of all learning takes place outside formal learning events, sometimes even over lunch or coffee, a great deal of flexibility is required for good performance support.
Measures of Learning
Elliott Masie said that a common wrong turn companies take is in wondering how they can formalize informal learning.
Tracking informal learning, Masie said, would require extraordinary steps such as keeping conversation logs and tracking wiki participation. The reporting requirements that would be needed, in addition to the unpopularity, make these plans unworkable. “In some ways you have to leave your hands off of it,” he said, and let it be an unstructured, peer-to-peer process.
“I think we have to distinguish between tracking something and measuring its impact,” Masie said, and companies can measure business outcomes to see if changes in strategy are working. He added that it was important that all learning be true, map to best practices, assist the company mission and be accountable.
“We’ve all gone to classes that aren’t good,” Masie said. “Guess what, there are also collaborative sites that are not really good. So, it’s really important that you not see informal learning as a place in which the quality measures go away.”
Payoff
There are also benefits from the pure networking aspects of such informal learning. Gottfredson cited a study indicating that as recently as 1986, people could cognitively store 75 percent of the information they needed to do their work. By 2006, they could manage on average to directly know only 8-10 percent of what they needed, and that amount is decreasing. This is why it becomes important for people to be able to get performance support information on demand, on the fly, on the go.
And sometimes, as mentioned, over coffee.
In his book, “The Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the transactional memory systems people use, how instead of remembering some kind of information directely, they’ll remember where it’s stored. That includes information stored with other people. Instead of remembering something directly, it can be more efficient to remember who remembers it best.
Gladwell explained that this was one of the factors in recently divorced people feeling depressed and perceiving themselves as less intelligent. Part of what’s lost in the breakup of a long term relationship of any kind is the information you came to rely on that other person to know, so he said that in a way, you’re losing part of your own mind.
This phenomenon can be a positive benefit to business organizations, Gladwell explained, citing the case of the Gore company, makers of GoreTex. By keeping work groups small enough that people can develop reliable transactional memory structures with their coworkers, they foster a deep sense of cooperation and shared purpose that boosts profits while making them one of the best companies to work for in the United States.
Which brings us back to justifying the costs of learning, or any, initiatives in a company.
“The finding and the retention of talent is critical,” Masie said, and the “best talent is going to flow to organizations whose learning arteries are unclogged.”
You can read more from Elliott Masie at Learning TRENDS, and from Conrad Gottfredson at PS: Learning @ The Moment of Need.
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